The integration of occlusion and disparity information for judging depth in autism spectrum disorder

Smith, Danielle; Ropar, Danielle; Allen, Harriet A.

Abstract

In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), atypical integration of visual depth cues may be due to flattened perceptual priors or selective fusion. The current study attempts to disentangle these explanations by psychophysically assessing within-modality integration of ordinal (occlusion) and metric (disparity) depth cues while accounting for sensitivity to stereoscopic information. Participants included 22 individuals with ASD and 23 typically developing matched controls. Although adults with ASD were found to have significantly poorer stereoacuity, they were still able to automatically integrate conflicting depth cues, lending support to the idea that priors are intact in ASD. However, dissimilarities in response speed variability between the ASD and TD groups suggests that there may be differences in the perceptual decision-making aspect of the task.

Citation

Smith, D., Ropar, D., & Allen, H. A. (in press). The integration of occlusion and disparity information for judging depth in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3234-x

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 26, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Jul 7, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 10, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 10, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
• Print ISSN: 0162-3257
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-3432
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3234-x
• Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, occlusion, disparity, cue integration, depth, 3D
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/871633
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3234-x
• Contract Date: Jul 10, 2017